How to Prepare Pizza Dough

Many of my recipes require good dough, and I like to to use 70% whole wheat flour. Therefore I’ve written this post, and linked some of my other pastry posts to it. This dough is originally Pizza dough for pizzas, but could serve as a basis for a nice soft bread, and other salty pastries.

Ingredients:

1 kg 70% whole-wheat flour

1 tablespoon salt

1 tablespoon brown sugar

2-3 tablespoon olive oil

50 gr fresh yeast

water

The Making:

Put the salt in a bowl.

Over the salt pour 1 kilogram of flour.

Pour the sugar over it, and over the sugar pour the rest of the flour.

Take the yeast and crumble it into the bowl. Cover the yeast completely with some of the surrounding flour.

Now pour on top of it 2 cups of water, and add the oil to the water you just poured on the flour.

WARNING!!!

The yeast mustn’t touch the salt or the oil directly, and the oil mustn’t touch the flour directly!

Now, begin to make a soft and smooth dough.

Add water as needed – never too much at a time.

The exact quantity of water depends on the present status of the flour, and the weather.

Feel the dough, and experiment.

Knead the dough well, until it’s flexible and nice to touch, and not sticky.

When the dough is ready, roll it, in a bit of olive oil.

Cover the bowl with plastic cling wrap.

Now if you’re Jewish – this is the time you must make HAFRASHAT CHALLA (I’m dying to write something about that in some future post).

If you’re not – just skip.

Put the bowl in the fridge for the night.

In the morning, punch the dough and wait till it doubles volume.

(Letting the dough rise in the fridge slows the process and gives a better tasting dough, but if you don’t have the time to wait the whole night, just leave it to rise about 2 hours outside the fridge).